Chapter 1
The New Age of Anxiety
Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Everyone seems on edge now. You’ve surely noticed it. It seems that everywhere one turns, people are awash with uncertainty and anxiety. So many people are struggling as they worry about the future. The world seems confusing, and people no longer seem to agree on the basic facts of what is happening around them. And it seems that every other young adult has been diagnosed with a mental health issue. These have been anxious times indeed. People’s anxieties surely got worse when the COVID pandemic upended their lives in countless ways. Making matters worse, climate change threatens to submerge cities along the coastlines while burning up the interior, artificial intelligence threatens to take over our jobs, social media makes people worry about how their lives compare with others, and increasing political polarization has gotten to the point that Thanksgiving dinner can feel about as tense as trying to defuse a bomb. The world feels far less stable and predictable than it did before. The amount of uncertainty in our lives can be quantified, and in 1990 a group of economists set out to do precisely this by creating the World Uncertainty Index, which is largely based on how often words related to uncertainty appear in various publications. Over the first decade of its existence, the index hewed close to a score of around 10,000. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the index spiked up to reach 28,000. It jumped even higher, to 39,000, in 2012 during the debt crisis that threatened to break up the Eurozone. And then in 2020, during the early days of the COVID pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, and an extremely divisive American presidential election, it soared to its highest point yet of over 55,000—about twice as much uncertainty as came with the 9/11 terrorist attacks.1 Given that the uncertainty index, like the Dow Jones, has risen and fallen while trending ever upward, it wouldn’t be surprising if your blood pressure has tracked a similar pattern over this same period. This is because we just can’t stand it when things don’t make sense. We have a psychological system that seeks to maintain a sense of meaning such that we can feel everything is stable and orderly and can predict and control what will happen to us. When people experience uncertainty, they don’t know what is going to happen and they are unable to prepare themselves for it. Uncertainty makes people feel things are spinning out of control, leaving them helpless and worried. The soaring levels of uncertainty that the world has been going through has left many people in a highly anxious state. Despite how uncertain things have been recently, we may be able to take some comfort in knowing that there have been previous eras of pronounced uncertainty and people somehow managed to get through those times. We can learn something about our current predicament by considering another time when the world also struggled with its collective anxieties. The last time the world made as little sense as it does now was during the middle of the twentieth century. People had recently struggled through the worst economic crisis in modern times only to face the most destructive war in human history, followed by the dawn of the Cold War and the realization that all of humanity could be destroyed in a nuclear Armageddon. It was a time of enormous upheaval, insecurity, and collective angst. In 1947 the existentialist poet W. H. Auden wrote a book-length poem in which he pondered what it meant to live during such an anxious period. Auden believed that people were feeling scared, uncertain, and disillusioned as they suffered through a collective crisis of identity and purpose because the old certainties of the past had been shattered by the war and the challenges of modernity. Auden titled his poem about this period The Age of Anxiety. The parallels between that turbulent age of anxiety with the nerveracking times of the early twenty-first century are striking, as they were both periods in which people struggled to find a way to cope with feelings of stress and a lack of purpose in their lives. Some have called the current era that we’re living through “the new age of anxiety,” and I find that label to be especially appropriate. The early twenty-first century has been an exceptionally trying time, and it has created a rather chaotic culture in which people are struggling to find a way to lead their lives. Why are people having such a difficult time during this new age of anxiety? To answer this question, we need to consider the role of a key psychological characteristic that helps people to successfully confront the difficulties of life—that is, the sense that one is leading a meaningful life. When people feel that they are leading a meaningful life, their lives make more sense to them. They have a sense of purpose that guides their behaviors. They feel that their lives really matter and that they’re capable of making a difference in the world. Meaningful lives make people feel more existentially grounded—they know who they are and why they are doing what they’re doing. When people feel that their lives are meaningful, they enjoy greater well-being and are less likely to suffer from the anxieties that come with uncertainty. The importance of living a meaningful life is a central focus of this book, and in the remaining chapters, we’ll consider why we need meaningful lives, what they do for us, and how we can get them. As important as it is to people’s well-being to feel that their lives are meaningful, there are signs that meaningful lives are getting harder to come by. For example, every year since 1966 a representative sample of American freshmen college students has been asked about their most important life goals. Among the goals they were asked to rank was “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” In 1966, a full 88 percent of students selected it as their most important goal. However, fewer than half of college students in the twenty-first century saw having a meaningful philosophy of life to be a key goal in their lives—rather, the most highly ranked goal was to be very well off financially. Over this period college students became far less likely to see their lives as being guided by a meaningful philosophy of life. I think this change of attitudes can help to shed some light on why life in the twenty-first century has been so nerveracking.2 Why might American students in the twenty-first century be feeling that they have less of a meaningful philosophy of life than before? To answer this, we need to consider what are the most reliable sources of meaning in people’s lives. As we’ll discuss throughout this book, the key ways that people derive a sense of meaning in their lives comes from the connections that they create between their lives and what happens around them. A life that is richly connected tends to be more meaningful. So what kinds of connections make life feel more meaningful? First, people build a sense of meaning from the close interpersonal relationships that they have in their lives. When people feel supported by a tight network of relationships, their lives feel more meaningful: they can share anything that happens to them with their loved ones. These feelings of connection with others can also come from people’s sense of community. When people feel that they belong to a community, this helps them build a sense of identity, and it contributes to the feeling of a meaningful life. People who have careers that provide them with a sense of identity, purpose, and mastery also feel their lives are more meaningful. In addition, the spiritual connections that people form between their lives and with what they believe transcends them are especially important in leading people to feel that their lives are meaningful. When people feel connected to something much larger than themselves, their lives feel more existentially grounded. All of these kinds of connections help people to feel better prepared to face the challenges of their lives, and we’ll discuss each connection in this book. With these bases of a meaningful life in mind, let’s consider how we can better understand the turbulent times of this new age of anxiety. I’m a cultural psychologist, and I study how culture shapes people’s minds. Our culture influences how we see the world, how we understand ourselves, and whether we feel that our lives are meaningful. But a challenge in studying cultures is that people have a difficult time appreciating their own culture because it is largely invisible to them, like the water that surrounds a fish. I’ve found that when we compare one culture to another, we gain a new perspective, which can shed some valuable light: we can better see aspects of our culture that are typically hidden from us. I think we stand to learn much about the tumultuous culture of the new age of anxiety by contrasting it with what the culture was like during the original age of anxiety. How have the lives of typical Americans changed between these two eras? There are, of course, countless differences between the typical American’s life from the mid-twentieth century compared to that of the early twenty-first century, but to understand what is contributing to people’s tense feelings of angst, we need to focus on those aspects of the culture that contribute to people’s sense of having a meaningful life. That is, we need to consider how well connected are Americans’ lives between these two eras. To begin, let’s see how the typical American’s interpersonal connections are compared to before. Unfortunately, people’s connections seem to have weakened over time. First, people are spending far less time interacting with their family members than before. For example, one survey contrasted the habits of American families between the 1970s and the 1990s and found that, over that period, the time that families spent together vacationing, watching TV, or sitting and talking decreased, and the percentage of families who said that they usually ate dinner together dropped by about a third. By 2022, the average American reported only having about three dinners per week with their families. The picture doesn’t get any better when we turn to people’s romantic relationships, as married couples have been spending less time together than before, approximately nine hours per week less in 2003 than in 1975. Families are just not as connected now compared with a few decades ago.3 Americans’ friendships have also been weakening. The amount of time that young people spend with their friends has dropped by about two-thirds in just the past couple of decades. And this recent trend built upon a sharp drop in sociability that was documented from the 1960s until 2000, which found that people were spending about 30 percent less time informally chatting with friends than they had in the 1960s, and they were about onequarter less likely to spend time with their neighbors. In 2023, the US Surgeon General released a report entitled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, which found that the number of Americans who reported having only three or fewer close friends has increased by over 80 percent in the past thirty years. Over the past several decades, Americans have become steadily less likely to spend time with their friends.4 Americans have also become far less engaged with their communities. In his classic book Bowling Alone, the political scientist Robert Putnam documented how much Americans have become detached from their communities compared with before. For example, Americans were more than twice as likely to belong to the PTA in the 1950s than they were four decades later. Likewise, far fewer people belong to civic groups than before. They are only about half as likely to belong to a union. They are far less likely to belong to service clubs, such as Rotary or Lions, and they are less likely to participate in community sports leagues. People no longer feel that they can turn to the community in times of need and are left having to figure out for themselves how to cope with the challenges that they face.5 People also derive much meaning from the connections that they create with their work, but these connections too have been increasingly undermined. For one, people change jobs more frequently than before, with millennials being considerably more likely to change jobs compared with those from previous generations. The twenty-first century has seen the rise of the gig economy, where people are often engaged in a number of temporary side hustles, such as driving for a car-share company or completing surveys online for pay. As the number of people working remotely has risen sharply, fewer have a workplace they can identify with or a set of colleagues with whom they regularly interact. The trend of people losing their jobs to automation has accelerated, and the specter of artificial intelligence taking over so many jobs has also placed people’s future career identities under threat as well.6 Americans have been losing yet another kind of connection that is closely tied to a meaningful life—connections to a higher power. Since the 1950s, Americans have become about one-third less likely to attend church regularly. In 2020, for the first time in recorded history, fewer than half of Americans belonged to a house of worship. A full 30 percent of Americans say that they don’t follow any religion, whereas in 1972 only 5 percent said this. Some people may see this as an encouraging development because of the intolerance that traditional religious beliefs can seem to foster. However, research on meaningful lives paints a more worrisome picture of this national trend. The potential cost of this secularization movement is that nonreligious people are far less likely than religious people to say that their lives are meaningful, and they show evidence of worse mental and physical well-being as well.7 These data on the ways that people are becoming disconnected from their families, friends, spouses, communities, careers, and religions are all from Americans. But the American experience is not unique, and there are parallels in many other countries around the globe. One clear trend around the world is that many countries are becoming steadily more individualistic over time. People are becoming more likely to prioritize their own personal interests ahead of those of their close relationships and groups. Research finds that people who live in more individualistic cultures tend to have less meaning in their lives. This trend suggests that people around the world are losing many of the traditional kinds of connections that form the foundation of a meaningful life.8 The existential psychiatrist Viktor Frankl described the kind of society that we’re currently living in—one with fewer traditional bases of meaning —as an “existential vacuum.” In an existential vacuum, people struggle with finding ways to see their lives as meaningful. Their lives are characterized by a state of boredom, emptiness, and apathy as they have difficulties in finding something in their lives that they can feel engaged with and can make their lives feel meaningful. In these contexts people are often searching for anything that can distract them from how pointless their lives feel. In an effort to fill this void, they may chase after superficial sources of gratification, such as excessive consumption or mindless entertainment, but these only serve to temporarily relieve their itch. Frankl thought that a key challenge for modern societies was that people did not have sufficient connections in their lives. He recognized that when people are struggling to find ways to lead a meaningful life, they are more vulnerable to developing anxiety and depression. The culture of twenty first-century America shares much in common with an existential vacuum, and Frankl’s concerns with the aimlessness of people’s lives seems more relevant than ever.9 The challenges in this difficult era are quite evident to everyone. In a recent survey, Americans were asked how their lives compared to those of people like them from fifty years ago. A majority of them reported that life is worse today than it was fifty years ago, and most people expected that things would only continue to get worse in the future. When you look at the erosion of the key sources of meaning in people’s lives, perhaps it isn’t surprising that people say they are worse off now than before. It is difficult to feel fulfilled in a life that isn’t well connected.10 But wait a minute. When you think more closely about this, the claim that life for Americans has become much worse than before is puzzling. It’s puzzling because over this period of time, by many standards, so many things in the average American’s life have gotten far better than they were before. To shed some light on the curious predicament of people’s lives in the twenty-first century, let’s consider some of the objective improvements in the quality of life that the average American now enjoys in contrast to the time of the original age of anxiety. To begin, it would seem that average Americans are far wealthier now than they were before. In 1950 the median family income in the United States was $35,442. By 2017, controlling for inflation, it had more than doubled to $75,938. Much of the extra money that people have been receiving has gone toward the accumulation of more and more possessions, which they store in their houses, which have grown steadily over this time. In 1950, the average house size for a new single-family home in the United States was just under 1,000 square feet, yet in 2015 it had more than doubled to around 2,600 square feet. These are quite dramatic signs of economic improvements, although rising inequality means that many of these improvements have been more concentrated among the wealthy. It might be tempting to conclude that Americans’ lives have become relatively more lavish because everyone is working harder now than before, but actually the opposite is true. In 2017, on average, Americans were working about 12 percent fewer hours than they did in 1950, so Americans have been experiencing an increase in leisure time compared to the past. With the extra income they’ve been receiving, Americans are retiring earlier than they used to. In 1950, the average age of retirement was 70 years old; by 2010, this had dropped to 64 years old. Moreover, the amount of time that people spend in retirement has dramatically increased for the simple fact that people are living much longer now. In 1950, life expectancy in the United States was 68.1 years, which was less than the average retirement age then, meaning that typically Americans continued to work until their deaths. In contrast, life expectancy in 2021 was 79—about eleven additional years of life since 1950—and much of that increase is spent in retirement. People’s lifespans have been increasing because of numerous medical advancements, among them vaccines that make people less likely to get sick and medical treatments that are able to treat, cure, and prevent many of the ailments that used to kill broad swaths of the population in the first half of the twentieth century. With such improvements in income, leisure, retirement, and health, the typical American’s life would seem to be objectively better off than before. And these improvements in the quality of life are not just specific to Americans. As Steven Pinker argued in his book Enlightenment Now, since the mid-twenty-first century, life across the whole globe has been improving on almost all measurable metrics for centuries, with the notable exception of climate change. By these objective terms, it would seem that, for the most part, life has been getting easier.11 This contrast between the culture of Americans living through this new age of anxiety and those that lived through the original age of anxiety thus reveals two clear trends. On the one hand, life has been getting objectively better than before. It is easier for most people to have their basic physiological needs and desires satisfied than it was in the 1950s. On the other hand, however, people’s existential needs are not being fulfilled as well now. The connections that provide the key foundations that underlie a meaningful life have been eroding over time. This leaves us in the ironic situation where, despite how much better our basic needs are being met, we’re suffering more than we did before. The fact that life has become so much more challenging now, despite all of the material improvements, underscores just how important it is for people to have their existential needs met. We find it hard to thrive when our lives don’t feel meaningful. As people are struggling to find a sense of meaning in their lives in the new age of anxiety, they are bearing the consequences. The collective mental health of the world is not good right now. Many countries in the world have witnessed rapid growth in rates of anxiety, depression, and other psychopathologies. In particular, the so-called deaths of despair, which consist of deaths from alcoholic liver disease, suicide, and drug overdoses, have increased dramatically. These kinds of deaths await many who are unable to live meaningful and fulfilling lives. Since 1950, the rates of deaths of despair have tripled in the United States. Many of the struggles that people face have been increasing, particularly since around 2008, when rates of psychological distress, major depression, and suicide began to rise rather dramatically, with the increases being especially pronounced among the youth. These struggles with mental health spiked even more during the COVID pandemic, particularly with young people. As one large investigation of the rapid rise in mental illness among American young people concluded, these stark increases are happening because “American culture has increasingly valued extrinsic and self-centered goals such as money and status, while increasingly devaluing community, affiliation, and finding meaning in life.” The difficulties of pursuing a meaningful life in the new age of anxiety have been taking a grim toll on people’s mental health.12 Learning from the Existentialists As people struggle to find meaning in the existential vacuum of the new age of anxiety, many are desperate for some much-needed guidance. How can we cope with all of this uncertainty and go about leading a more meaningful life? Again, I think the original age of anxiety can provide us with much guidance to help us through these difficult times. It was during the original age of anxiety, while people were struggling with all of the angst of those uncertain times, that the world gave birth to a new philosophy. This new philosophy sought to spell out how people could embrace their freedoms and confront their anxieties in order to pursue a life that was rich in authenticity and meaning. As one of the founders of this new philosophy, Jean-Paul Sartre, put it, “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” This new philosophy sought to provide people with guidance for how they could live a more meaningful life. It was called existentialism. The existentialists were a collection of largely European thinkers who first emerged during the chaotic times of the Second World War. They understood that many traditions from the past that people relied upon for guiding their lives could no longer be counted on in the rapidly changing environment of the modern era. The existentialists recognized that people can’t look toward others to find out how to live a meaningful life—there was no one-size-fits-all approach that could work for everyone. Rather, they realized that people’s lives unfolded as a direct product of their own choices and actions. They encouraged people to recognize that they were fundamentally free to decide how to chart their own life course. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the ideas expressed by the existentialists couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time. An extremely uncertain and anxious world eagerly embraced their intoxicating ideas about freedom, authenticity, and the pursuit of a meaningful life. The existentialists were celebrities of their era: the press closely covered all that they had to say, and many of them spoke to packed audiences wherever they traveled. So popular were the existentialists that they did something that no other intellectual movement has ever done—they inspired their own fashion. Their devotees, who could often be found smoking cigarettes in cafés or jazz bars, had long straight hair and wore wire-rimmed glasses and black woolen turtlenecks. Let’s briefly meet the key figures of the existential movement, who we’ll encounter again throughout this book. The existentialists included the charismatic French Algerian Albert Camus, who, aside from his influential contributions to philosophy, was also an actor, playwright, director, journalist, and novelist, as well as his university’s soccer team’s goalkeeper. His work was well recognized in his lifetime, earning him a medal for his efforts as editor-in-chief of the key underground newspaper of the French Resistance and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Camus was handsome, confident, and courageous and enjoyed much popularity. The journalist Adam Gopnik called him “the Don Draper of existentialism,” as he had throngs of female fans and was famous for his many affairs.13 Camus saw people in a never-ending pursuit of a meaningful life, striving to form coherent connections among all of the different aspects of their lives. However, Camus recognized that finding meaning in life was a tall order, as he viewed the universe to be fundamentally meaningless, lacking any divine basis that people could turn to for guidance. He saw that humans were thus in a predicament of trying to create meaning out of a meaningless world. Sometimes people would become aware that the meanings in their own lives had been constructed like a house of cards— ready to collapse whenever they recognized the meaninglessness of their efforts. Camus called this experience of being aware of the inherent contradictions of life “the absurd,” and when people were in the absurd, they would feel that nothing made sense anymore and would succumb to their existential anxieties. He felt that people needed to escape the absurd by doggedly continuing in their pursuit to construct a meaningful life. Camus remained an optimist and felt that we all can, and must, create a meaningful life for ourselves. His storied life came to an abrupt halt at the young age of forty-six, when his car crashed into a plane tree in central France. One of Camus’s closest friends, until a later falling out, was Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was an enormously influential thinker who passionately exhorted people to live their lives freely and authentically. The Frenchman saw that the ways that people’s lives unfolded were all due to the choices that they made along the way. As he stated: “There is no traced-out path to lead man to his salvation; he must constantly invent his own path. But, to invent it, he is free, responsible, without excuse, and every hope lies within him.” Sartre always practiced what he preached, and he showed the world what a life of freedom could look like. He famously led a polyamorous life together with his lifelong lover and fellow existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, with headlines calling them “the world’s first modern couple.” Although the freedoms of a polyamorous lifestyle have recently been growing in popularity, Sartre and Beauvoir were trailblazers and had to figure things out on their own. Sartre suggested they start their commitment by signing a two-year lease, but it continued for half a century until he died. They lived a bohemian lifestyle in Paris, and Sartre remained a freelance public intellectual throughout his long life, never taking a formal position at any university despite being one of philosophers.14 the world’s most celebrated Simone de Beauvoir was a free-spirited philosopher who saw uncertainty and freedom to be at the core of people’s existences. She felt that everyone should aspire to be in control of their own destinies, and this led her to play a key role in launching the modern feminist movement, arguing for the dismantling of the patriarchal structures that continued to oppress women. Always a champion of the downtrodden, Beauvoir embraced the diversity and complexity of the human experience and sought to liberate people from the injustices of society. Her life exemplified her many freedoms: she questioned societal traditions and enjoyed many affairs with both men and women alike, rejected all formal academic positions, and traveled the world. Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir had all been greatly influenced by the works of the dour German intellectual Martin Heidegger. Heidegger argued that people are inherently relational beings whose lives are inextricably intertwined with others, the particular contexts that they exist within, and are linked to how they understand their pasts and imagine their futures. He urged people to live authentically by embracing their freedoms and taking responsibility for their choices. But Heidegger’s reputation ultimately suffered as he was unable to take responsibility for his own puzzling life’s choices. He had been charmed by Hitler and joined the Nazi Party, which resulted in him betraying both his Jewish mentor, Edmund Husserl, and his Jewish lover, Hannah Arendt. In the subsequent decades, he tried to downplay this dark chapter of his life story, but he never apologized for his actions, nor how they had impacted those closest to him. The existentialists also included a survivor of Auschwitz, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. It was while enduring the horrors of the concentration camps that Frankl identified how the inner decisions that people made regarding how they faced their adversities affected whether they lived or died. Frankl felt that people needed a sense of purpose to survive and that this laid the foundation for a meaningful life. His autobiographical account of his time in the concentration camps, Man’s Search for Meaning, continues to be read in college courses around the world. Though it discloses the deep inhumanity of this time, it is surprisingly inspiring and helps people to confront their sufferings, live in the present moment, embrace their freedoms, and strive to lead a meaningful life. The existentialists built upon the ideas of some nineteenth-century European thinkers, called the proto-existentialists. Just emerging from the Enlightenment, the traditional ways of the world were loosening, as was the authority of the church, and individuals were recognized as having more choices in their lives than before. Søren Kierkegaard, an anxious and melancholic Dane, was the first to identify how people were free to choose their life paths. He recognized that people could pursue an authentic existence by embracing their freedoms, yet at the same time he saw that it was those same freedoms that were at the root of their anxieties. Kierkegaard’s ideas had much impact on the ever-suffering Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who explored the alienation that some feel when struggling to follow their own life paths. His characters strived to live their lives authentically but suffered from the responsibilities of their choices. Friedrich Nietzsche was quite accomplished in his youth, a young wunderkind professor of philology and an amateur composer. He became close friends with the composer Richard Wagner, and he counted the king of Bavaria as a fan of his works. But he was forced to give up his professorship at the young age of thirty-four because of health issues. From that point on, the stateless Nietzsche was supported by a small university pension, which allowed him to travel from country to country in search of a climate that could ease his persistent health problems. During these itinerant years, he would spend his days wandering along mountain paths, deep in thought, and later scribbling down his ideas. He would write in the voice of the prophet Zarathustra, urging his followers to strive to transcend the shackles of society and religion to become Übermenschen, overmen or supermen who embrace all of life’s challenges, are authentic, and create their own life-affirming values. Nietzsche had rejected the idea of absolute truths, noting that we all experience the world through our own subjective lenses. Though few people read Nietzsche’s philosophical musings during his lifetime, he became famous after his death and his ideas had a great impact on the existentialists. The existentialists offered guidance for how people could best live their own lives, and we will revisit many of their ideas throughout this book. They emerged from the individualistic cultures of Western Europe where people were breaking free of the restrictive traditions of the past. The existentialists had largely abandoned formal religion, and they recognized that this meant that there were no longer any fundamental guidelines to dictate how people should lead their lives. People needed to discover the meaning in their own lives for themselves. When the existentialists abandoned religion, they also left behind the promise of an afterlife. They recognized that an awareness of the finitude of life brought forth a key source of existential dread: they questioned how one could find purpose in a life that was destined to become nothing but dust in the end. But the existentialists saw that confronting one’s mortality could remind one of the urgency to live an authentic and meaningful life. The existentialists all agreed on the key point that people’s lives are ultimately what they make of them. There’s no path that’s been marked for people to follow; they need to blaze their own trails as they go along. The existentialists were captivated by the new freedoms that were available in the modern age and saw that people were free to choose how they approached their lives. They felt that people needed to use their freedoms to help them to live their lives authentically, making their life choices in ways that were consistent with their deepest values. The freedoms that the existentialists preached about are exhilarating, and this was the primary attraction to so many of their ardent followers. But the existentialists recognized that our freedoms always come with a significant cost: if our destinies are up to ourselves, then we are ultimately responsible for our actions. Each choice that we make comes burdened with responsibilities that can weigh heavily on us, knowing that all of what happens to us is brought on by our own choices. The existentialists recognized that our freedom thus always comes bundled with much anxiety as we must contend with the possibility that we’ll sometimes make the wrong choice. They saw that both freedom and anxiety were at the core of human existence. The existentialists also recognized that the ways that people can chart the courses of their lives must always be done from their own subjective perspectives. Though we may feel that we are directly perceiving an objective reality, the existentialists realized that we are always experiencing the events in our lives through a story that we are telling as we go along. As Beauvoir put it, “One can never know oneself but only narrate oneself.” The stories that we tell about ourselves and about our worlds determine how we make sense of our experiences, understand who we are, and direct our actions. Our life stories are guided by cultural values, and even though we are all unique individuals, each living a one-of-a-kind life, our stories share many common themes with those of others. As we’ll see throughout this book, the ways that people tell their own life stories determines the meanings in their lives.15 The Science of Existentialism the mid-twentieth century, existentialist In ideas were enormously influential, and they were embraced around the world. However, these ideas were largely discussed and debated before there was really any scientific understanding around the issues that they raised. Their ideas were seductive and fun to ponder, but at the time there was no scientific basis to them. There was no scientific guidance available for how people could pursue a rich and meaningful life. Recently, a new discipline of psychology has emerged that studies the kinds of questions that the existentialists originally raised but uses the tools of science. This field of existential psychology has sought to provide a scientific foundation for the pursuit of a meaningful life, and it offers a guide for how we can start making sense of our lives. As we’ll see, this new science of existentialism has uncovered a lot of evidence in line with what the existentialists were arguing. It has explored such questions as: What aspects of people’s lives lead them to feel the most meaningful? How do people come to narrate their life stories, and how might they tell their life stories in a more constructive way? How do people respond to having so much choice in their lives, and how can they come to live with their choices? How can people cope with the existential anxiety that comes with the awareness that their lives on this planet are so brief? How can people become more resilient when facing life’s challenges? How do people respond when they find themselves stuck in the absurd? This book strives to provide some scientifically grounded answers to these kinds of questions, which are so central to our existences. For the past couple of decades, my students and I have been conducting psychological experiments on these very kinds of questions. We have sought to understand how people come to make sense of their selves and their worlds. Our research has explored people’s strategies for helping their lives to make sense, and the costs that people pay when their lives are incoherent. We have studied how people’s cultures provide value and meaning in their lives, and how it shapes the ways that people understand themselves. We have investigated how people come to terms with the freedoms inherent in their lives. We have also considered the role that people’s spiritual beliefs play within their pursuit of meaning. We’ve made much progress in being able to explain how people are able to lead meaningful lives. One key question that we’ve investigated is what happens to people when their lives no longer make any sense—when they find themselves stuck in the absurd that Camus described. To study how people react when they feel meaningless, we designed a series of some highly unusual psychological experiments. We have probed people’s responses to the absurd by having them confront the surreal films of David Lynch, watch an overly realistic humanoid robot, or be the unwitting participant in a magical trick where one person mysteriously transforms into another. In our efforts to investigate the absurd, we’ve had people play blackjack with reversecolored cards and get immersed in the dreamlike world of Kafka, and we’ve studied how people react when their closest relationships betray them. All of these studies point to some common strategies that people rely on to make their lives seem less absurd, as they struggle to move forward in their pursuit of a meaningful life.16 In the following chapters, we will consider how people can start making sense, even when everything may seem absurd around them. We’ll explore why people need meaning in their lives in the first place, and how they go about trying to maintain it. And we’ll discuss a number of strategies for how readers can better meet their existential needs, to help them lead more meaningful lives. These strategies can help prepare readers to live more effectively in this new age of anxiety.